


Little Neptune

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Background Poly, Compelled Love, F/M, Fae & Fairies, Fae Magic, Fate & Destiny, M/M, Multi, Mystery, Non-Explicit Sex, Polyamory, strange romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 10:38:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12725007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Three days after the drowning of Emily Prentiss, the ocean gave her back.





	Little Neptune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blythechild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/gifts).



> Written for the 2017 Criminal Minds Reverse Bang, with amazing art made by the wonderful Blythechild! Don't forgot to pop over to her [post here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12725202) and check out the accompanying (GORGEOUS) art for this.
> 
>  
> 
> Titlecard is also by Bly!

 

When Emily was seven, the ocean stole her away. There was nothing outwardly remarkable about this. Children, as a whole, are tremendously good at drowning. Unsupervised children with a knack for doing exactly what they’re not supposed to are even better at it. Emily, with stubborn disregard for the human prerogative of staying alive, was gone for three days. She’d tell this story later, to a tall man with a scientist’s mind and a magician’s imagination, and he’d ask, “But where did you go?”

Emily, as though the thought had never occurred to her, would reply, “Down.” He’d never manage to get a clearer answer than this, no matter how much he questioned her.

Three days after the drowning of Emily Prentiss, the ocean gave her back. A fisherman in his boat found her sitting on a buoy, salt-laced and sun-drenched with her bare feet trailing in the lapping waves. Dressed exactly as she’d been lost and completely unperturbed by being drowned, except for blue-tinged lips and a sand-encrusted shell gripped tight in one clammy palm.

“But wait,” she’d cry to the water below as the man pulled her to safety, “will I see you again?”

The fisherman was confused.

The ocean didn’t answer.

They left that place soon after and Emily grieved that. She loved the island with its loud people and white beaches and humid heat. She loves the rows of grape orchards and the scent of spice. She liked how everyone fussed over her, the girl who’d returned from the sea, and she liked the stories they made up about the time between her drowning and becoming found.

She liked that her mom let her keep the strange coin they’d assumed was a shell until it was washed. A man from the city nearby made it into a necklace for her and she wore it proudly as proof that not even death was all that certain. She liked that the old lady who lived near the embassy called her Little Neptune, and she definitely liked that she got to invent wilder and wilder stories about those three days to the children at school.

“I was swallowed by a whale and only escaped by tickling his belly,” she decided one day, to general disbelief.

“Pirates stole me and I became one of them,” she pronounced another, the week before Elizabeth informed her that they were leaving the island to return to the place that Emily only distantly remembered, back to America which was far away and not at all this place she’d come to love.

“I swam away because I hate you!” she screamed to her mom, angry that she would dare to take her away from this place.

On her last day there, she slipped away and back down to the beach where she’d been stolen. Unlike that night, the water was calm and clear and hurt her eyes with sharp lines of white and blue where the sun struck it just wrong. Knees sinking in the sand and waves licking at her legs, she crouched and trailed her fingers through the briny foam. She was alone.

“I’m going away,” she told the ocean uncertainly. The doctors had said she’d been dehydrated, confused, frightened, and that was why she’d thought the water could hear her. But rather, she disagreed; the ocean was full of ears, just not the kinds that doctors thought were important. Who was to say a fish’s hearing was worth any less than a seven-year-old girl’s? “Why won’t you talk to me?”

The ocean didn’t answer.

“I do remember,” Emily huffed, standing on her own two legs and turning her back on it. “Ignoring me won’t make me forget. There weren’t any pirates or whales… just a boy. A horrid, shy, _mean_ boy who won’t say goodbye even though I’m going all the way home to Seattle, where there aren’t any islands or storms or stupid _boys!_ And I won’t be lonely at all!”

She was wrong about this. There were certainly boys back home in Seattle and storms as well. Then, there was the Middle East and Rome and all the places in-between that she at some point or another called home, but none she ever loved as much as this small island. And she would be lonely in all of these places. What she was truly furious about was being given a taste of adventure and having that taken away before she’d had a chance to grab it with both hands.

The ocean didn’t reply as she strode away full of righteous indignation about the state of the world, but it did listen.

And time went on.

 

* * *

 

When Emily turned fourteen, she deliberately lost herself. She was angry, perhaps, that no one really cared for the story of Little Neptune’s drowning anymore, or, more likely, she was railing against the fact that no one seemed to care at all for Emily Prentiss.

Losing one’s self was as easy as finding the right bottle, the right pill, the right party, the wrong boy. None of it felt good or fun or adventurous.

On this night, they’d stolen a boat.

“Think we could make it to Ponza Island before Dad notices we have his boat?” John asked, laying across the bow with his head tipped back and stars reflected in his eyes. Summer yearned to reach into the cold water around them, pressing down in a suffocating blanket. Emily tied her shirt in a knot around her belly and ruefully dreamed of the mini-shorts the girls back in Seattle were allowed to wear without having to worry about decorum or class or their mother frowning at them because, _it’s not becoming in Rome, Emily, to dress like that._

“Nope,” Matthew replied. He was watching the stars too, the wild sweep of the cloudless sky and the yellow moon above. Emily wasn’t interested in the stars. She slipped down to the stern and dangled with one elbow hooked around the railing and her fingers trailing in the ocean below. Around her throat her necklace hung heavily, and she idly wondered if she’d be as lucky twice if she slipped and fell. Emily, with all the wisdom of her fourteen years, had decided that luck was responsible for the return of her seven-year-old self.

The water whispered below her. She ached to let go, to drop in, and remembered very suddenly, how it felt to drown.

Panic. Fear.

Calm.

Something brushed her fingers and she pulled back quickly, startled by the touch, before leaning forward and frowning down into the dark, endless depths. Seeing herself reflected in the shifting mirror below. Arm aching, fingers cramped where they kept up a relentless grip on her life, she stared into the water until her eyes were teary and blurred and she was forced to blink.

“Why are you hiding from me?” she whispered back, feeling silly and girlish for giving into this strange desire to _speak_. “I _know_ you’re listening. Answer me!”

“You alright, Emily?” Matthew asked. He touched her shoulder, breaking her concentration.

She turned away.

“Yeah, fine,” she said. “Is there anything else to drink?”

They would be caught with their stolen boat and it would be added to the list of things that Emily had done to disappoint her mother. Strangely, once grown, Emily would remember clearly this moment—floating on the sea under an endless starry sky with the lights on the shore winking back at her—but she never would mention the excitement that had occurred the very next day. It had slipped her mind, for some reason, that the teenage boy the Italian coast guard had found adrift at sea was at all important to her. _American,_ the newspapers had remarked, if she’d bothered to read them. _Who is he?_

Two months later, she was sitting in the garden at the Embassy, tucked between a tree and a white brick wall, when the boy found her.

“Hello, Emily,” he said with a voice like someone had explained to him how he was supposed to speak without actually letting him hear the language, pausing and looking at her with strange, dark eyes.

“I don’t know you,” she replied crankily. “Go away.”

He smiled and the expression was secretive and a little lost. “You could ask who I am and then I wouldn’t be a stranger. That wouldn’t be as rude as telling me to go away.”

Emily looked at him. He looked at her.

“Who are you?” she finally asked, feeling a little like she was being trapped. And then: “Wait, no, I do know you. You’re the boy they found. The one from the sea. I thought they’d found your family?”

“Oh, not yet,” he responded casually. “I haven’t seen anyone I like enough yet. And I wasn’t found. You have to be lost to be found—I’ve never been lost, not once.”

“What’s your name?” she asked. Fed up with this boy and his silly games, she wanted to know and be done with it. She didn’t have the patience for adventure that she’d had seven years before. She could have sworn he answered. But, later when reminded of this encounter, she remembered nothing except dark eyes and the scent of salt.

The ocean, as it turned out, had listened.

 

* * *

 

When Emily Prentiss was twenty-one years old, she was still lonely and her neck was bare. The necklace, the importance of which had long been forgotten, sat in a box at her mother’s. She rarely thought of the sea.

She doubted anyone ever really believed in magic.

This is only important because of the juxtaposition. Elsewhere, there was a boy just like her, except for all the ways he was different. She’d one day meet this boy.

She’d already met him.

He dreamed of the sea nightly. He was never lonely, because he knew he’d come here for a reason. He was never lost, because it hadn’t yet occurred to him that he was more than just his story. He didn’t yet know he was more.

He’d once been returned by the ocean too.

“What are you gonna do with your life?” the boy in the bed across from him asked, “You can’t just coast through life, you know, weirdo.”

“I’m not weird,” he replied softly. “I think I’ll help people.”

Helping people, he’d decided, was an entirely perfect reason to be alive.

 

* * *

 

Twenty-eight was a strange year for her. She became someone else. It was the first time, but it wouldn’t be the last. Not so long from now, she’d slip on the skin of Lauren Reynolds and become Ian Doyle’s companion, lover, fiancée, and, eventual, betrayer. She’d find out that there were shades of dark hidden inside her that she hadn’t known she’d possessed.

But, before all that, she met Aaron Hotchner.

He was cocky and young and arrogant, just like every other federal ass working for her mother. She was just as young, just as cocky, and wired with the knowledge that—after this Christmas—she was going to disappear. Her mother knew, of course. Emily wasn’t the only one with secrets, with a job that worried her family. Picking at the Christmas roast, Emily eyed Aaron Hotchner standing guard in the corner of the dining room, all dressed up pretty in his suit and radio, and wondered why her mother had a security detail now, just what had warranted it this Christmas when it had never been needed before.

The table was set for eight but only the two of them dined. Emily would be gone before the others arrived. It was a week before Christmas, twenty-one years after Emily had been stolen by the ocean, and she felt… unsettled.

“When will you leave?” Elizabeth asked. Emily shrugged and met Agent Hotchner’s eye. Perfectly professional, he didn’t flinch away. She wondered if he ever smiled. She wondered if he ever laughed. “Emily?”

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Emily finally replied. She didn’t look at her mother, knowing there’d be a worry in those eyes that she didn’t really want to face. “It’s a desk job. I’ll be bored out of my mind.” She was lying. Elizabeth knew it.

She wondered if Hotchner did.

“How are you getting to London? Plane would be quicker but, you know, you could take a cruise… much longer, but if you have the time to spare…”

“Mother,” Emily said, rolling her eyes. “That’s ridiculous. No one takes ships just to…” She paused. Ah. Her mother was… stalling. “I don’t much like the sea. Aren’t you always telling me how I almost drowned?”

“You don’t remember?”

Emily lowered her fork. “No,” she said quietly, excusing herself. “No, I don’t.”

Twenty-eight was the year of leaving that behind, those stifled dinners and awkward sentiments hidden by stiff non-concern. Twenty-eight was finding out that she was far more than she’d imagined and that she could be hurt in ways she’d never known were possible. But first, it was waiting until Aaron Hotchner had finished his shift and waylaying him at the gates. It was offering him a cigarette with a smile and a flicker of eyelashes.

“You don’t even know me,” he said to her, pressing close nonetheless in the bitter chill of the winter night. Frost tipped his dark hair, his cheeks turning pink in the dry air. “Why would you follow me out here?”

She studied him. From his perfectly presented suit right down to his wide hands slung in the pockets of the peacoat overtop. His scarf was ocean blue. She offered the cigarette again, after taking a draw that was slow and long and entirely because she was scared of dying. “Because I have nothing to lose by flirting with you,” she replied.

He took the cigarette. His fingers were as warm as his shoulder against hers.

She figured, at the time, that it was just one night. One night driving with him back to his hotel room, one night spent learning his body. Nothing but a single night in a life that could have so few nights remaining.

“Did you mean that?” he whispered, shifting against her and into her with an _oh_ that almost took her breath away. “When you said that you don’t like the sea?”

“What does it matter?” she asked him. “Lots of people hate the beach.”

He looked troubled, but didn’t question her further.

“Don’t forget me in the morning,” he’d teased from the bed as she’d dressed and left him there. She’d rolled her eyes at this uncharacteristic joviality. He wasn’t all that memorable, but still, she had her pride. Of course she’d remember, even if she never saw him again. She doubted she’d see him again.

On both counts, she was wrong.

 

* * *

 

She met Spencer Reid at thirty-five. She’d think later that, out of everything in her life, meeting Reid was the most serendipitous. After all, there was nothing fated about them becoming friends.

They did anyway.

At thirty-five, she joined the BAU. Joined Spencer Reid on the two desks pressed flush in the far side of the bullpen.

Joined Aaron Hotchner’s team.

He gave her the exact same look he’d given her that one night, seven years ago: troubled and wary and a little confused. “Why are you here?” was the first thing he asked her. He was adamant that she wouldn’t be a part of his team.

She was adamant that she would be, and, so, she ignored his stiff non-regard. When he split the team up, she was with Morgan or Gideon or Reid, never with him. That was fine. She didn’t need his acceptance to do her job. It didn’t bother her at all that ‘Hotch’ was gentle with JJ or proud of Morgan or kind to Reid, all while being nothing but professionally brusque with her. She didn’t need anything different.

“He’s just…” Reid tried to soothe her, shifting his hands in some strange attempt to say ‘just’ what Aaron Hotchner was.

“An asshole,” Emily muttered, a little too loud. JJ snorted. Reid looked scandalised. The door above their desks remained closed; the blinds drawn.

That would change.

A case took them to Cape Elizabeth. Surveillance duty: parked with Reid on the edge of the cape, looking down on a beachside shack with the moon dipping overhead. Reid, uncharacteristically quiet, kept looking longingly to the ocean.

“I was lost at sea once,” she remembered suddenly, turning her head to follow his eye-line. “When I was a child…”

A startled owl gaze was shifted around to face her, his expression open and excited in the pitch-dark of the car interior. Behind his glasses, he blinked rapidly. “What? How? How long for?”

The house they were watching was silent when she glanced back to it. “Three days,” she recalled slowly, as though digging through a foggy bank to find the memories she’d forgotten. “I… three days. They found me on a buoy.” Her throat was bare and cool when she touched it, haunted.

“The average human can’t survive more than three days without water. You were a child, much more susceptible to dehydration and exposure.” As though imagining her lost, his eyelashes flickered, casting deeper shadows on his sharply lined face. “You were very lucky. Where did you go? When you were lost?”

She eyed the house then closed her eyes, breathing in the briny tang to the salt-laced air they were surrounded by. Outside the car, the waves shifted gently. She imagined being small. She imagined being lost. She had to imagine, because no memories remained except… blue. Blue and then dark and the moon far above.

“Down,” she said finally. “I don’t remember anything else.”

Reid nodded seriously. “No,” he murmured, looking back to the sea, “you wouldn’t…”

Wherever that conversation was trying to take them, it ended abruptly as the man they were watching for made his move. Emily was only glad that he ran away over the asphalted roads and not the sandy dunes. There was nothing fun about running on sand, except perhaps watching Reid trying not to slip and fall as the unsteady ground shifted under him. She took a blow to the head because she wasn’t quite quick enough and Reid followed her with a split lip and a bruise on his cheek. They got their man, after their man got them, but she was pleased with the outcome anyway.

Hotch found her in the hospital triage room getting her scalp stitched back together. She had to swallow a little at the strange hop-jump her heart did upon realizing he was there, some integral pull from deep within her that remembered what the man looked like naked and smiling and undone. Back when he was Aaron to her, just for a night, and not Hotch with his storm-cold eyes.

“May I have a moment?” he asked the nurse, nodding politely before turning back to Emily. “You were reckless.” _Tap_ went his neatly polished dress shoes as he stepped forward once. “You should have called for backup. Your actions put you in danger…”

 _Tap tap_ and his knee brushed hers, his hand flickering towards a flaky brown line of pooled blood on her shoulder. With a jolt, she remembered she was in nothing but a bra and the flimsy paper gown the hospital had given her, pulled down low so they could work. His chest heaved once, the ‘Hotch’ expression she’d gotten used to vanishing, exhaustion and worry layered there.

“I did call for backup,” she said, squaring her shoulders and shoving away the attraction/fear/guilt. “If we hadn’t confronted him, we would have lost him. Reid and I did nothing wrong.”

His hand dropped away and he stepped back, the mask returning to its place. He looked, for a moment, torn, before finally murmuring, “Yes. Your call was the correct one, just not the… Emily, I—”

The nurse returned. Emily watched him turn mid-sentence and leave, and felt very much like how Spencer must have as he’d tried to run across the sand dunes with the ground shifting and unpredictable under his feet. She was determined; whatever unspoken madness had been visible in his eyes as he’d looked at her tonight, she wouldn’t acknowledge it. It wasn’t worth the cost it would bring. And she wasn’t the kind of woman who would be swayed by a man looking at her like he’d been afraid of her loss.

But, as it turned out, she was just that kind of woman.

It was a mistake. The memory of the triage room and everything they hadn’t said in there was a broad wall between them; that didn’t stop them from taking yet another step. A night drinking. She was finally off the painkillers for her head, Hotch had finally stopped frowning every time he caught sight of Reid’s mouth. Morgan invited them out. They went.

And it was a mistake.

A mistake that began with him offering to walk her home, her coat folded over his arm. A mistake as the night clouded around them, cool enough that she shivered, shivered enough that he leaned close and tugged her coat tighter around her shoulders.

They kissed. It was also a mistake. She wasn’t even sure if he meant to. One moment he pulling on the collar of her coat to turn it right way out, the next he’d swayed down and bumped their lips together.

She kissed him back.

It wasn’t like the last time. The Aaron Hotchner she fucked this night was nothing like the Aaron Hotchner of seven years ago. This one’s shoulders were bowed, his face deeply lined, and she could see in his eyes that he was counting this as some immeasurable failure. He kissed her collarbone as he shuddered inside her, once twice, and then leaned his lips against her skin. The weight was comforting and frightening.

He stayed the night and they repeated their mistake in the morning without saying a word. The whole time, Emily couldn’t help but feel they were walking a path they’d began a week before Christmas, so long ago. She was dangerously certain that this was the kind of man, intense and sharp and hard to get close to, that she could absolutely fall in love with.

And that would be a mistake.

 

* * *

 

She’d always suspected she was doomed to be stupid. Fucking turned to something terrifyingly close to making _love_ , and that was a phrase she’d always loathed. Something else she loathed: how unstoppable falling for him felt. Something deep and insurmountable right down inside her took every whispered _Emily_ that fell from Aaron’s lips and turned it into proclamations of love and forever, and she hated herself for every furious thought.

“You’re angry at me,” he said one morning, walking into the kitchen of her condo and finding her hunched at the kitchen table brooding over the way he looked at her. It was seven months since she’d walked into his office and announced she was part of his team; it was three months since they’d begun this game.

“I’m angry at myself,” she admitted. “I never thought I’d be this, this…” She couldn’t finish that sentence without hurting him. He just watched her, hurt anyway. And she couldn’t find the words to express her reservations. How could she say, _I don’t feel like myself around you,_ or, _I don’t want to fall in love with you,_ or, god forbid, _even Doyle left me with more agency than this._

“Fucking hormones,” she muttered instead, grabbing her coat. They left in separate cars and she took twice as long at her morning coffee-shop so that no one at work would put two and two together and come up with ‘Prentiss is banging the boss.’

“Are you okay?” Reid asked, looking up and tilting his head in that strange way he had as she walked in. Not for the first time, she wondered what alien had taught him how to communicate with the human race. The words were right; it was the inflection that was all wrong, as though he’d learned ‘How to People’ from a twelve-step audiobook program.

And they weren’t quite friends yet, despite her smiling at his jokes and nodding in appreciation of his endless passion for living, so all she said was, “Fine.”

 

* * *

 

She compartmentalized. At work, she tucked this weird thing she was doing with the boss away in the same section of her brain where she put everything else that worried her. Hotch seemed to do the same. And they went on, much as they had before.

She walked in on him and Reid one day. The two men were leaning close, talking in the kind of voices she’d only ever heard from Hotch in the bedroom before. Pausing, she stopped and watched them unabashedly for a moment; they were in the hallway of the hotel and it wasn’t like it was a _private_ area. But, when Hotch heard her and jerked away from Reid with his eyes wide, she thought she might have been out of place nonetheless.

Reid just smiled like usual and sidled past with his hands spread awkwardly and his gaze twitched low, and that was nothing new.

“What was that about?” she asked Hotch after, seeing two points of pink on the man’s normally emotionless face that sunk something low and nervous into her belly.

He didn’t meet her eyes. “You know better than to ask me that,” was the reply, in a voice like he wanted her to assume it was work related.  She didn’t believe it for a moment.

And then there was Hankel.

It went wrong so impossibly fast. One moment Reid was there, at her side as flappable and gangly as always, the next he was gone and the room was so empty she thought she might drown in all the space that had suddenly been allotted to her. And it was like drowning, the drowning she remembered. The same panic, the same fear.

The same calm.

She was the only one holding onto that calm. Maybe those three days on the buoy alone had served her well in that respect. JJ was damaged; Morgan bubbled with an incendiary rage; Gideon was stunned; Garcia was hysterical.

Hotch was…

Hotch was unlike she’d ever seen him.

It was the night in the hospital triage room but somehow sharper. His face hid the storm she knew was brewing in his dark eyes, his movements quick and violently calm.

“We’ll get him back,” she tried on the first night, and Hotch simply gritted his teeth and said, “Of course.”

“We’re closing in,” she lied on the second, the images of Reid being tortured burning her retinas every time she closed her eyes.

Hotch said nothing.

On the third day, Reid died.

Emily wondered if this was how her mother had felt upon turning around and seeing a half-built sandcastle, an empty towel, and a trail of child-sized footprints leading to the relentless ocean. She wondered if the grief had been instant, because it hadn’t hit her yet that he was gone, and she wondered if Elizabeth had been struck by how irreparable loss could be.

And then, Reid breathed again.

Hotch led the way into the parish. Emily followed him. She was shaken. Three days lost; the something deep and unignorably demanding in her chest was alive again and pulling her towards Spencer Reid. Because, out of everyone here, she knew how it felt to come back from the dead.

They found Reid by the body of the man who’d taken him, a shovel by his side. He didn’t look at them at first, didn’t really look anywhere. Just stared blankly around like he was searching for the hand who’d saved him from drowning, as though he was a bare heartbeat from crying out, _but wait, will I see you again?_

Hotch staggered forward, dropping to his knees and dragging the man into a broken, lopsided hug. For a moment, the world was silent except for their heaving breaths and Reid’s soft, _I knew you’d understand._

Emily just watched. Her weapon in her hands and breathing air that was tinged with salt; it began to rain with heavy drops that burned her eyes. Something about that rain frightened her. It wasn’t real but it was… alive. It smelled of loss and hurting and fear.

In that broken, hurting rain, she remembered that she’d once died, watching Hotch pull Reid upright, one leg hanging grossly. _I drowned._ She closed her eyes and remembered a boy.

And she didn’t forget him this time. Not in the drive to the hospital. Not in the cautious waiting. Not in the walk to his room.

Not when she strode in and found Reid huddled tight to Hotch’s side, his shoulders heaving as the other man held him like he couldn’t help it. She stepped back, stayed silent, watched. Watched until Reid’s eyes lifted and he looked back with tear-damp lashes dark on his pale, damaged face. Deep shadows ringing eyes that, in certain lights, were dark.

She remembered those eyes watching her from the water below, but not in that face.

Three days lost, they’d found him. Just like she’d been lost for the same length of time, the same hopeless shift of day and night, but not alone. Not alone at all.

 _“How long do I have to wait out here?”_ she remembered complaining, bare feet tickling the surf and shoulders burning from the sun.

 _“Until you’re found,”_ said the boy laying on his belly, fingers tracing lines in the sea.

_“Don’t you mean until we’re found?”_

_“No. I’m not lost. I know exactly where I am.”_

_I remember you_ , she realized, and touched her throat, remembering clapping and laughing as the boy had ceased to be a boy and danced in the waves for her instead. Hotch watched them both with an expression like he was trapped and, maybe, he was. Just as trapped as her.

_“Will you leave me here? And swim away?”_

_“No, never. I can’t. I saved you—we’re bound to each other now. I’ll always find you.”_

In that moment, she knew who Spencer Reid was.

In that moment, she remembered her belief in magic.

 

* * *

 

She didn’t confront him. She _couldn’t_ because, in the time after Hankel, Reid shattered. She watched it happen as though she was watching a live-action rerun of her own teenage years. The same twitchy nervousness, the same drawn skin, the same haunted eyes. He started wearing long sleeves and refusing to make eye contact with any of them when they asked how he was going.

It was two months until he was due back at work when she finally broke and went to see him. She found him lost in himself; his apartment was filthy, closed in, and he didn’t look like he’d bathed in a week. Or smell like it either, and every insane thing she’d been about to accuse him off slipped away in the face of his destruction.

“Pleased with what you see?” he asked with a voice like broken glass. “Not all of us can _compartmentalize_.” He turned and limped away, his shoulders hunched and mouth twisted.

She stayed. It was the least she could do; he’d saved her life once, somehow.

“Shower,” she said quietly, and did everything but strip him down to get him in there. Hoping he didn’t drown—but not really expecting that that was a concern—she cleaned while he bathed and everything she found was another reason they’d failed to support him. Mouldy take-away containers and soiled shirts stiff with sweat and speckled with brown spots of dry blood along the inside of the sleeves. Notebooks piled around the couch she moved without opening but still caught glimpses of endless pages of manic, frantic scrawl interspersed with sketches of the boundless ocean. She fancied that, in a few, she could see a sleek form playing in the waves.

Heart aching, she cleaned and replaced the sheets on his couch with fresh linen from a cupboard that creaked like it had never been opened before, perching carefully after on the edge of the cushions. He emerged from the bathroom, hair wet and slicked back, a towel around his waist, and stared at her like she was a ghost.

“Where are the drugs, Spencer?” she asked, “and don’t lie.”

His mouth thinned. She knew he was going to be cruel. She didn’t care.

“Why are you here? Shouldn’t you be off fucking Hotch?”

Silence. Neither looked away until she repeated, deadpan and cold: “Where are the drugs?”

She’d find them eventually, even if he refused to tell her.

“He doesn’t really love you, you know,” Spencer mumbled bitterly later that night, his voice slurred and face damp. Withdrawing, badly, and she hated him for how weak he looked right now when she knew he was fundamentally stronger than this. “He can’t.”

She ignored that as well. Like she was going to take advice from a… whatever he was. Figment of her fucking imagination, no doubt.

“Shut up,” she told him, checking his heart-rate. He twitched away from her touch, eyes skittering everywhere but her. She missed him in that moment, the him of _before_.

When he finally slept, she picked through his numerous bookshelves. Philosophy, psychology, engineering; she didn’t find what she was looking for until she went to make sure he was still sober, still breathing, and found a small stack of yellow-paged books on his bedside cupboard. Thrown down next to them as though discarded, he was a limp, exhausted shape of long lines and a barely beating heart. She sat next to him with her hip against his and tried to see what parts of him were human.

All of him, at first glance, even when taking into consideration the parts that were strange. He was human, dangerously so, and she flicked a lock of sweat-damp hair from his eyes and ignored his twitch. Dark eyes flickered open, shuttered shut: he knew she was there and was too wrung out to care.

She picked up the closest book. Its bulging pages were folded, the cover sticking up at a broken angle. As she held it, tilted it towards her, something fell from the pages into her lap. A coin. Heavy and dense with the picture almost completely worn away; she picked it up and felt dizzy before finding the buckled pages that had been folded around it.

“Greek and Roman coins?” she asked, her voice too loud in this hushed room. He twitched again, eyes opening and squinting against the weak light trickling in through the half-open door. She got up and closed it before returning to the bed, watching as he shuffled aside to make room for her next to him, propping the book between them. “Which coin is this?”

He stared at her, at the coin in her hand, and didn’t answer.

But the book lay open accusingly, the seal depicted on the golden surface staring back from the coin photographed within. “Emily,” he murmured, as she reached for the next book— _The maighdeann-ròin_ —and then the next— _Peter Kagan and the Wind_. A third, in a small museum-issued pamphlet, _Dylan ail Don_.

“What _are_ you?” she asked furiously. At her thigh, her cell hummed in her pocket.

“I’m me,” he said finally, burying his head in the pillow. “I’m just me, Emily, and please don’t… don’t keep digging.”

And she owed him her life, so she put the books down and waited out the storm with him, her dreams haunted by a boy who was a seal at heart, dragged to shore by a girl falling clumsily into the waves.

 

* * *

 

They became friends after that. It only made things harder because there was something that was becoming apparent; Aaron’s feelings for her were nothing compared to the way she caught him looking at Spencer.

“Does he look at you like that because he knows what you are?” she asked Spencer one evening, making dinner for them both while they waited for Aaron to come to hers from work. Always working late, always reserved, she knew this was something that would be ending soon and was only half resigned to that. “Or _because_ of what you are?”

Spencer winced, finger pausing over the screen of her smartphone where he was filling out the New York Times crosswords app. “Don’t ask me that,” he pleaded, eyes lifting to hers. He utterly refused to answer any of her questions and it drove her _mad_ , “you know I can’t answer…”

But she was relentless. “Selkies have powers of seduction in basically every version of the myth,” she argued. “Spence, if you’re magicking us, I think I have the right to know. Since I’m the one dating him and he doesn’t _know_.”

Spencer just looked back at the screen. “I’m not magicking him,” he replied quietly, and refused to answer any more questions. But, when Aaron finally arrived home, he kissed Emily and lingered over Spencer’s shoulder, helping him with crossword clues that they all knew the man didn’t need help with.

In bed with Aaron later that night, she finally asked, “Do you love him?”

He jumped and turned to stare incredulously at her. “ _Reid?”_ he exclaimed. “Emily, what on… no!” But she knew when he was lying. She’d heard Spencer whisper it on the way out of the door, the soft, _tell her, Aaron,_ that neither had realized she’d been in earshot of. _She already believes._

Her necklace was where she’d left it, languishing in a box at her mother’s. She regained it and examined it closely, finding the impression where once a seal would have been indented into the soft metal before putting it back on. Elizabeth was surprised to see it.

“I thought you’d lost that years ago,” she said.

Emily shook her head. “Mom, do you remember a boy? Found at sea like me?”

Elizabeth paused. “In Rome? Yes. Of course, he was American. The Embassy helped him return home.”

“Home?” Emily frowned. How could they have returned him _home_? “To his family?”

“I believe so. The details elude me. Why?”

“No reason.”

She looked Spencer up. Everything was there: birth certificate, elementary school records, even vaccination records. The FBI database had everything on him and it told the story of his life without room for returning from the sea. She put it aside, moved on, tried not to obsess over the discovery of magic.

Two days later, Aaron froze midway through undressing her as her blouse fell open to reveal the coin heavy against her sternum. His fingers traced it, his expression soft.

She swallowed hard and felt it end.

“Talk to me,” she whispered, leaning her mouth against his hair and feeling him shiver closer, undone in a way he’d never let himself be at work. “Tell me what’s going on.”

“I can’t,” he replied, his eyes closed. “Emily, please, I can’t. Don’t ask me to, just…”

In that moment, she hated him as fiercely as her fourteen-year-old self had hated the sea for ignoring her. “Just keep pretending it’s okay that you want _him?”_ she asked bitterly, not hating him for this, not really, but more for the fact that he was too cowardly to admit it. “That you’re with me because I’m a woman, because that’s expected, because you’re lonely, because you’re afraid of being _different_.”

Bizarrely, he began to laugh. Hoarse, startled laughing that shocked and then angered her.

“I think you should leave.” Shirt hanging open, pants-less and without pride, she slipped out of bed and folded her arms. “Aaron, I want you to leave.”

The laugh faded. He nodded, eyes sad, and dressed silently. “Do you want me to come back?” he asked.

She shook her head, cheeks flushed and feeling like, for the first time, that she was fighting this thing that was bigger than she was. Despite the tears burning her cheeks, despite the simmering feeling of shame, she wasn’t dropping to her knees in the face of his indecision.

She was determined not to be lonely without him.

 

* * *

 

And time went on.

They solved cases. They saved lives. She wore the necklace, she spent time with Spencer, with JJ, with Garcia. She was lonely and yet wasn’t.

Aaron watched her sometimes and his eyes were unfathomable.

She caught them kissing once. It was her fault this time. She’d declined to go drinking with them, changed her mind part way, driven to Spencer’s apartment and found them kissing in his car. Only a snapshot before she’d quickly turned on her heel and walked away, embarrassed to have seen something so raw, but there was a desperation in their hands on each other than Aaron had _never_ had with her.

Footsteps thudded heavily after her and she slowed.

“Emily,” Aaron said. She turned and studied him, at his ruffled hair and his bitten-pink lips and the barest shade of a mouth-shaped bruise on his chest where his shirt was undone. “We should talk.”

“We really don’t need to,” she said gently. “I’m happy for you both, I am, truly.”

He shook his head, stepping towards her with his eyes frantic. “No, I mean, I need to tell you… this isn’t about you, or it _is_ about you but not because of you—” He stopped, frustrated, shaking his head and scrubbing his palm over his chin. “Being with you was _easy_ and Spencer isn’t and we fight and crash against each other and it’s _unpredictable_ and I—I need that. I _need_ it… I… I’m lost without it…”

Two years on the team and she wasn’t ready to see him this open, this chaotic. She didn’t want to see Aaron Hotchner, professional, concise, Aaron Hotchner fumbling for the words to tell her why he was happier with someone other than her.

“It’s okay, Hotch,” she said, and left him standing there. She went home and looked up selkies. There was one thing the legends all had in common and it hurt, because she wanted him happy just as much as she wanted her own happiness.

They always returned to the sea.

When it happened again, it was just as much of a mistake as the first time. _Come over,_ Spencer’s text had said, and they spent the night watching sci-fi movies and wondering which would be the most likely to come true, nursing a bottle of wine that became two that became three that became Spencer inching closer and murmuring, “He still loves you.”

She froze. “It’s been a year, Spencer,” she replied coolly. “Don’t reopen old wounds.”

But he was watching her through his lowered lashes, looking young and coy and a little out of his depth. In the bedroom behind them, light leaked out from under the door where Aaron was reading after excusing himself from their movie marathon. “You’re so willing to accept that I’m _magic_ ,” Spencer complained suddenly, rolling over and resting his hand on her thigh with a touch that seemed to shake him just as much as it did her, “but you’re not willing to accept that maybe we can _both_ be a part of his life?”

She’d question him later, on whether this offer was because he hated to see them hurting, or if it was because he was kinkier than she’d expected, or if it was because it was part of his fae nature to love only the one. The last thing made her feel a little mad, a lot crazy, and would goad her into leaning forward and asking, _what’s it like, being you?_

He wouldn’t answer then, and she didn’t answer him now.

The door behind them opened. “I’m going to sleep,” Aaron said. Emily wondered if he’d moved in, abandoned his lonely condo that had none of his personality within it. “I’ll see you in the morning, Spence. Goodnight, Emily.”

Spencer sat up, stalling them both, his long fingers twined through hers. “This is stupid,” he said angrily, hazel eyes narrowed. “Why are you both dancing around each other for my sake? We’re not _normal_.”

Emily smelled salt. When she closed her eyes, she could feel the press of the waves on her body. Spencer stood, fingers still wrapped in hers, and she followed with the strangest sense of unmooring.

“We’re not normal,” Spencer repeated, quieter this time, and she opened her eyes to find him drawing her towards the bedroom. Towards Aaron, who brushed his fingers on the coin around her throat when she came close enough to him. His eyes dark with hunger and something deeper.

She nodded.

It was probably a mistake, but it was a glorious one.

She woke in the morning with Aaron curled around her like he couldn’t remember how to be apart, Spencer alone on his side of the bed and seemingly content to be so, his arm thrown out and fingers brushing Aaron’s bicep. Both fast asleep. It was _weird_. It wasn’t normal. It would absolutely horrify her mother.

She decided not to fight it.

It might have been a mistake, but it wasn’t lonely.

 

* * *

 

When Emily was forty-two, the ocean returned for one she loved. Despite expecting it, it absolutely took her by surprise.

It wasn’t anything magical or fantastical that caused it and maybe that was what she resented the most. It _should_ have been something brilliant and memorably tragic; a betrayal like in the old stories, a lost key or stolen sealskin. Anything to close this life they’d lived beautifully instead of culminating in blood and gunshot residue.

But it wasn’t anything so lovely.

Instead, it was George Foyet. It was him sneaking into the home Aaron now shared with Spencer—Emily was just as much a part of their lives but she was determined to have her independence and had never taken them up on the offer of a room—and hurting them all with a single knife. It was finding Aaron in a pool of his own blood, struggling to drag himself upright as he stared at her with wild eyes and panted, _he knows_.

It was Spencer being gone.

There had been hints, of course, that this end was coming. Ones she’d ignored. She _had_ to ignore them. She couldn’t face the idea of being alone once more, of the murmured conversation she’d heard them quickly cease, the one that whispered, _you’ll be safer in the sea._

Bizarrely, it hadn’t been Aaron who’d said that.

“You need to go to the hospital,” she told Aaron, horrified at the sheer amount of blood he was losing, fumbling for her cell to call for help. Spencer was gone—taken—and Foyet _knew_. How? Even she’d struggled to comprehend, never fully understood.

“No,” Aaron said, grabbing her hand. His fingers left bloodied marks on her wrist. “Emily, he’s doing this to get to _me_.”

She shook her head. “You said he knows what Spencer is,” she argued, “even _Foyet_ isn’t going to focus on revenge in the face of having the fucking _faerie folk_ come to life.”

Aaron stared at her. Blood pooled from his elbow, _drip drip drip_ , to spatter the story of what was happening onto the tiles below them.

“Emily,” he whispered.

She was wild, ranting, furious that every moment they stood here was another moment that Spencer was gone, that he was lost, that Foyet could take his body and heart and do as he wished to him in order to fulfil some sick outcome. “No! This is insane—we’ve ignored it, we’ve pretended nothing is different about him, that this is _fine_ , and now he’s going to—”

“Be fine,” Aaron said dully.

Emily stared. He let go of her wrist, letting it swing down heavily to her side as a sudden dead weight. “How did he find out?” she realized, taking a step back. “I looked Spencer up, his cover is… ironclad… it’s perfect. There’s no holes in his history, like he’s… human.”

Aaron nodded.

“He’s _human_.”

Aaron nodded again.

She took a breath, touched her coin, and asked: “What if I’d looked up yours?”

There was a fixed silence between them, a broken kind of waiting. She was forty-two, thirty-five years since the day she’d drowned, and wondering how long his magic had been misdirecting her.

“No one ever has,” he said finally. His eyes were dark and bottomless, ocean eyes and she’d only just noticed. Only just realized. Because of course it was bizarre: to her mind, Spencer was the kind of man who could have grown from a boy playing in the waves. But Aaron? “No one ever had reason to. He won’t hurt Spencer. He wants _me_ , Emily. Spencer is just… the bait.”

She hated him again, but tiredly, and wondered if his magic stopped her from hating him truly.

“How much of this is real?” she asked him as they found their weapons. Alone, they’d hunt a human more monstrous than Aaron had ever been. “My memories? My feelings? Are they real or just products of you saving me? What _hasn’t_ your magic fucked with?”

His bloodied fingers paused on the box of bullets he was removing from the gun safe. And there it was; more proof she’d been too blinded to see. He should be dead. He wasn’t, despite the blood painting this day in patterns around his home.

“It’s real to me,” he said finally, standing. “It was always real to me.”

That was a lie. She made sure he didn’t brush her on the way out, pulling a coat over his red-brown clothes. “Then why did you spend our entire life fighting it?” she asked bitterly. She didn’t ask how they were going to find Spencer. Aaron had always found her, after all, and she wasn’t the only one who wore one of his coins. “Why drag Spencer into it if you were happy being who it made you? Who _are_ you, because you’re not the fucking man I thought you were?”

He didn’t answer. She was glad he didn’t.

Before she’d drowned, she’d never really liked the sea.

She hated him for taking that away from her.

 

* * *

 

It ended swiftly and without much care for how much time they’d had and deserved to still have. They had only the drive to Spencer still together. They spent it scared and wired and they spent it talking.

 _Who are you,_ she’d asked so many years ago, and he finally answered.

He was the boy from the ocean, the one who’d lifted her from the waves and back to the surface where she could breathe. He was the boy they’d found at sea, despite never being truly lost until he returned to land. He was Aaron Hotchner now and a hundred different names previously, broken up by the time he’d spent being one with the ocean he called home. She wasn’t his first, he doubted she’d be his last, and none of it was his fault.

“I’m a fae, Emily,” he said, his cheek pressed to the glass of the car window as she drove towards the horizon before them. “I’m trapped by my nature. As soon as I step ashore or take the hand of a human woman, I’m trapped by what I am. My nature forces me to love them. I’m drawn to them as helplessly as you were drawn by the waves when you were a little girl. My not loving you is as impossible as you ceasing to require the air or the sun to survive—it’s a foundational part of me, and it… it affects you too. From the moment I raised you from the sea, you were doomed to love me. I’m sorry for that. I was sorry as soon as the first time we slept together, when I realized how keenly you needed your agency. You shouldn’t have been able to walk away from me that day but you did… and I began to wonder for the first time what kind of a life I could have of my own, without haunting yours… and then I lived it.”

“And then you leave,” she replied quietly. The indicator ticked. Somewhere back in DC, she knew the alarm was probably being raised, the bloodied apartment found.

“And then I leave. We don’t have a happy ever after, ours isn’t that kind of tale.”

“And Spencer? Why _him_? Nothing of your nature caused you to pull him into this!”

There was an ocean ahead. Gulls surfed the sky above, the grasses beside the highway turning sparse and scrubby. Her heart pattered and worried and fretted over what was to be lost.

Aaron finally answered, just before the end. “I’ve never loved someone without magic before him,” he said simply. “You were fate; he was _more_. I’ve lived hundreds of years, Emily. I’ve left so many before without a thought for them once I’d returned to the waves. I’ve left wives, children, friends… I’ve lost the memory of more lives than I’ve regained—but this is the only time I’ve ever fought what I am.”

The car stopped below them. She didn’t know why she stopped here, just that it felt right. They looked to the beach, both moving as one as they unbuckled their seatbelts and Aaron’s hand pressed down momentarily on a gash on his chest, his mouth twisting.

“We’re not going to win this, are we?” she asked, a final question as they walked towards the sea below and the man standing in the shallows, overtop of the body before him.

“No,” replied Aaron. “We never do.”

That wasn’t their kind of tale.

 

* * *

 

Foyet gloated. _Too late too late,_ he repeated. Spencer was silent and facedown below him, rocking with the sway of the surf. They had their guns. Aaron was magic, but that didn’t stop him from shooting Foyet in the head and emptying his clip into the body when it fell.  Anticlimactic, maybe, but their story didn’t include Foyet in the cessation of it. He was just a footnote.

Emily ran. Into that cold, lapping water, into the waves, and she rolled Spencer to face her and cried out at the blue tinge to his lips, the emptiness of his eyes.

“Stay there,” she yelled to Aaron, shoving Foyet’s body into the pink-tinged water and hooking her hands under Spencer’s arms, dragging the sodden body back towards the shore as the tide pulled at her legs and her feet and the sand below, trying to suck her back out into the ocean that’d she’d only just remembered she hated.

A wave hit. She staggered, slipped, fell. Water closed overhead.

She did not let go. They went under together for a long, frozen moment, pushed towards the shore and then dragged as the tide pulled them greedily back.

Hands caught her, pulled her up. Foyet’s body was gone as she surfaced, spluttering and struggling to stand under Spencer’s weight. Aaron held her steady, his gun in his hand and his clothes soaked. Knee-high in the water, he steadied them and the water slowed around them, lapping at his pants like a kitten greeting its owner.

“Help me get him to shore,” she panted, heaving Spencer up over her shoulder and feeling him grunt a little against her, eyes flickering open. He was _alive_. “Aaron, for Christ’s sake, help me!”

Staggering ashore, dragging Spencer with her, they fell to the sand and lay in the gritty muck with the water still splashing onto their legs.

But Aaron stayed where he was.

“I can’t,” he said quietly. And smiled like goodbye. “As soon as I step back in, it ends, Emily. That’s how it ends. Every time.”

Spencer coughed weakly, his face pink except where it was a ghastly white, and the sand below them was stained with red. Distantly, she heard sirens.

She swallowed. “Fight it,” she whispered, but he just looked helpless. “Fight it, fuck you! You’re not _just_ a seal, Aaron, you’re a human too! Fight it!” But, below her hand, Spencer’s heart was slowing. They both looked to him, Emily drawing his shirt back and hissing at the damage Foyet had done to him, to his beautiful hands, his chest, his arms. She changed direction. “Did I die?” she demanded, standing with rivulets of water funnelled from her body to make streams on the sand below.

Aaron looked at her, his body already indistinct against the spray around him as the sea began to shift faster, responding to the goading of a building storm. “Yes,” he said bluntly. “You were dead when I found you.”

She nodded.

That made things easier.

Like _fuck_ they didn’t get their happy ending.

“Take him,” she said, crouching to grab Spencer. Aaron stared. “Can you do that—can you take him? Can you _save_ him?”

“Yes.” It was almost a whisper, as though he hadn’t dared to hope. “Just once. Just once, I can make one of _you_ into one of us. Just once. But… if I do that, I can’t come back, Emily. Not ever.”

She smiled. “Good. Then you’ll never be trapped again.” And she waded back into the ocean beside him, letting him take Spencer from her arms. “You’ll be _free_. Will you remember me?”

He paused, awkward with Spencer in his arms, jerking up to kiss her anyway. A salt-flavoured, tear-sticky kiss. “No, not completely,” he admitted. “Perhaps the night I saved you, I may remember that. The night I found my Little Neptune.”

She kissed him one last time on that storm lashed beach, and then he stepped away and slipped away and, before she could blink, they were gone.

She was alone.

 

* * *

 

She returned to that beach once every year. Sometimes, she left things behind. A newspaper clipping mourning the drowning of two FBI agents. Eulogies written by those who’d loved them. A box of Spencer’s favourite candy.

She never stayed to see if the things were taken.

When she was forty-nine, she returned and someone was already waiting for her. She didn’t notice him immediately, her heart skipping a beat as she poked at a shell in the sand and then looked up to see a dark bump in the waves regarding her playfully. As she stared, it dipped and ducked away, a wavering line in the white-capped surf that gambolled around the slowly blinking light of a buoy out to sea.

It was cold. Winter. The air was bitter.

She stripped nonetheless and dove in without fear, swimming until her muscles ached and her body was numb and her fingers bumped the barnacle-rough surface of the heavy buoy. She pulled herself up, wiped hair from her eyes, gasped with the cold, and then turned to find him sitting behind her.

“Hi, Spencer,” she whispered, and held him close. A boy half the age he’d been when she’d lost him, he cried with her as his hands rubbed over her frozen skin.

They stayed like that as long as she could bear it, her feet dangling in the ocean below, toes curling every time a dark shape shifted below them. They talked.

Before she swam to shore, he pulled her close and murmured, “Come with us.”

But she wasn’t done living on her own terms, so she replied, “Not just yet.”

And he understood, so he nodded. He’d ask this question three more times, on three more frozen swims. On the third, she barely made it back to shore. Sixty-three and hale at heart, her body protested the ice-cold water, and she faltered.

Slipped below the waves.

Two warm shapes lifted her and pressed her to shore. She made the last few feet alone—she had to. Her pride depending on it, and their freedom. For they were creatures bound to their nature: if they stepped upon land, they’d become beholden to that nature.

She refused to be the reason that happened to them again.

When Emily Prentiss was seventy, the ocean returned for her. Alone, she drove to the beach. It was smaller than it had used to be, the sand eroded away. But he waited in the shallows, a blurry childlike shape to her fading vision, and she scowled.

“You shouldn’t be ashore,” she scolded him, breathing heavily with her heart panging hard in her fragile chest. “You’ll get trapped.”

“Never,” Aaron responded softly. She gasped to hear his voice, just the same as it had been the first time. Aaron, not Spencer, and her heart skipped two beats and slowed as it remembered that it had once been enchanted to love him. “You’d never allow that.”

Enchanted no more, she still loved.

“Are you ready?” asked another voice, a small hand slipping into hers. Spencer, and her vision wasn’t so bad that she couldn’t see his wide smile.

“Absolutely,” she said. She’d lived her life how she wanted, and she refused to be lonely again. Together, they went home.

And time went on.


End file.
